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💬 The Wrap

Heading into the end of January, I'm a little bit over winter, but heading off to Italy shortly for some 🏂 snowboarding and 🍕 pizza to liven it up. But first: emoji news.

Last week was the quarterly Unicode Technical Committee meeting held at Google in Mountain View this time around. As a "Supporting Member" of the Unicode Consortium, Emojipedia gets 0.5 of a vote, but so far it's yet to have been used.

Most decisions at Unicode are made by consensus. If there is no consensus, a vote could take place, but that may be an indication there is more to discuss instead.

Unicode has now authorised March 5 as the release date for Unicode 12.0. This is when the final emoji list for 2019 will be published (Emoji 12.0 / currently still in draft), alongside of course, all the other Unicode characters being added this year. In practice, most people are only just getting updates on their devices for the 2018 emoji list, which is now supported on all major platforms.

While I have you here - I want to give a special mention up the top to the Emojipedia Emojiology series. This is a deeper look at individual emojis and their various influences, and if you've ever been stumped by this emoji - 😳 - then I have just the article for you.

Ignoring the headline for a moment - this gives a small insight into some of the WeChat specific emoticons that are used in the wildly popular app in China. These appear to have a variety of sources, and some would make for good standard additions to Unicode.

📰 News

WhatsApp remains HUGE in Europe in particular, and its emoji set shown on Android has growing influence. Primarily, the set aims to match Apple's emojis closer than any other vendor: like if you gave someone Apple's set and said "like this, but better where you can".

This year was odd as WhatsApp released new emoji support in December 2018, then changed a bunch of designs this month in a separate release. See all the changes from both updates in this changelog from Keith Broni.

Out today, EmojiOne has changed a number of designs in their emoji set. Despite not having widespread use on most platforms, EmojiOne remains committed to their designs that can be licensed. Notably also the only vendor which now keeps the 🔫 Pistol as a weapon by default (though being a downloadable set, the company also provide a toy water gun as an alternative).

🎙 Podcasts

🤗 Lastly

That's it for this month! If you're new to the newsletter, I'm Jeremy Burge: the founder and Chief Emoji Officer at Emojipedia. This is a fairly informal email of things I find interesting each month, and I hope you agree.

You can follow me on Twitter at 👨🏻‍💻 @jeremyburge or this newsletter (and podcast of the same name) at 🌯 @EmojiWrap. For all the official news from Emojipedia itself (especially new emoji releases) the best option is 📙 @Emojipedia.